The middle school in Garching has given itself a special name. Since 2018, the school has been officially named after Max Mannheimer, the Jewish Holocaust survivor and active admonisher who lived in Haar for many years until his death in 2016. With the name, the middle school also feels obliged to the history of Max Mannheimer. The students are always intensively involved with Mannheimer’s life and efforts, through his tireless eyewitness reports, not to let the cruel deeds of the National Socialists fall into oblivion, especially among young people.
Pupils and their teacher Martina Blechner have now poured this “never again” into a play. As part of project days, fifth and sixth graders performed “My name is Max” for the first time; Among the audience were Max Mannheimer’s daughter Eva Faessler and her daughter.
In the play, two male and one male pupil embody Max Mannheimer in three central phases of his life. Mannheimer himself published the memoir “Three Lives” in 2012. Each section makes contact with the others in the person of the performers. At first, as a boy, Max dreamily played with marbles in his home town of Neutitschein. The 23-year-old Max, on the other hand, is crouching under a chair with the number 99728, taken to the concentration camp by the Nazis, where he lost his parents and sister and had to suffer horrible things himself. The number is the prisoner number tattooed on Mannheimer’s forearm. Accompanied by a melancholic song, 70-year-old Max looks back on his two previous lives. The piece ends with the haunting message that Mannheimer also advocated throughout his life: “My story must never be repeated.”
Because the piece was so well received, there will be a film recording of it. Other demonstrations are also possible, as the middle school announces.